First of all, IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 RC is now available for download, so you can try all the new features right away. By the way, this is the last chance to share your feedback before the release.

Second and probably more important (as you may have already guessed from the title), is that IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 introduces Sublime style multiple selections, the top voted editor feature in our tracker!

Multiple selections work nicely together with IntelliJ IDEA features like Code completion, Select word at caret, Join lines, Copy/paste, and the others. Here’s a little demo:

As cool as it is to use now, this feature still has a long way to go: its implementation remains to be refined, and some limitations need to be dealt with. So we would really appreciate your feedback about it. Share your thoughts in our discussion forum and submit bug reports to the issue tracker. Thanks!

I like the mouse idea, but adding in keyboard finding support would also add power. The refactoring features (such as renaming variables and methods) solve some of the use cases, but not all. I would look at vim multiple cursors for inspiration (even though its implementation is a bit incomplete). I miss being able to find every occurrence of a code sample in vim and be able to perform something more complicated than find and replace on all instances.

Also, this feature could be better integrated with the vim plugin for IntelliJ. Multiple cursors doesn’t seem to work in visual or insert modes (normal mode is the only one).

Woo, I reported a bug over a year ago! Maybe that’ll be fixed sometime this year too. Glad to see that more new features are being added, but it would be nice if the existing features worked properly first. (does that count as feedback?)

What do you think about proper AspectJ support (http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-76479)? There are also numerous issues with Gradle, but at least that’s being actively worked on. AspectJ performance has been very suboptimal since IntelliJ 11.

New editor features are nice, but language and toolchain support are much more important.

I’ve reported a couple, but by far the most annoying is http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-102890. It affects AppCode as well as IntelliJ, so no matter what project I’m working on I get to spend a lot of time manually reformatting comments.

My colleague and I also wonder when/if it will be supported. PhpStorm EAP and WebStorm EAP are already supporting this.

My colleague tried to compile PyCharm from 135 or 136 source tree and multiselection kind of worked but not very well. I think that this eventually will be available but some work needs to be done to update PyCharm to newer core version. Current 3.1.2 RC is using version 133.

But how do you paste three different texts into three different lines simultaneously? (in the first part of the demo) did you copy the three lines from another editor first? (line 1 would be “Develope with pleasure” line 2 “Mit Vergnügen entwickeln” etc)

Unfortunately, as a programmer in 2014, I already have 100 poorly-documented third-party libraries and services that I have to integrate. Asking anyone to reverse-engineer a new undocumented feature pretty much ensures that it goes to the bottom of their to-do list.

I truly hope that multiple paste already works perfectly ‘out of the box’ for every user in every situation. Reverse-engineering complete pasteboard support for an app can take hours, because of how many little details there can be, and I can’t justify that for another app right now.

You asked for feedback, and that is mine: you should document your work, especially features that interoperate with other software. A blog post with an animated GIF is cool but it is no substitute for real documentation.

To pass data into IDEA via clipboard, you’ll need to prepare a text with a line per supposed caret. There’s nothing more you can do at the moment, in terms of integration.
If it doesn’t work for your use case, please let us know, we’ll try to fix it.

While I have played around with Sublime Text, I never used it enough to learn the benefits of this feature. I guess my question is this: What can I do with multiple cursors that I can’t easily do in previous versions IntelliJ (or some other editor.)

Does anyone know of any tech articles out there outlining some clever tricks that utilize this feature?

It seems like a more visual way of doing most of what people use keyboard macros for, in other editors. IntelliJ IDEA looks more visual than structural (like, say, Emacs), so it’s probably more consistent with their overall design, even if it’s a little bit less powerful in some cases.

I’m more used to macros, myself, but I think it’s a clever idea, as long as it can be done without confusing the existing meaning of the cursor and the selection.

Any chance to see updated plugin for Python in nearest future? Or why 135 branch don’t exists on the github? release 13.1 rc was 2 days ago but bruch still doesn’t exists… I’m not have ability even to compile python plugin from source =(

nice feature. However I don’t like that when I am done with multiple selection editing and press Esc, the carret is set to the last selection. I would prefer the caret to be positioned where it was before doing multiple selection editing.

Glad to see this feature added and hopefully it evolves. Right now it is still to rough around the edges to use. Arrow keys, home and end key, backspace, delete, etc do not seem to move all the cursors with it. I look forward to this feature getting ironed out and improving. For now I’m assuming only alphanumerical keys work with this?

The new feature is great. One thing I cannot do however is use it with the existing text search. If I press Cmd F (on Mac) and use Regex matching, can I get multiple selections for each found occurrence?

Alt-Shift-Click is known to work on Mac. Maybe you are trying Alt-Shift-Drag (that resets other carets/selections currently)? Could you also try whether Alt-Shift-Click is recognized on your system by mouse shortcut configuration dialog in Settings -> Keymap -> ‘Add or Remove Caret’s context menu -> Add Mouse Shortcut?

Is there any support (now or planned) for being able to skip selecting a match? It turns out to be really helpful (I use it in ST2 fairly often), more than it may seem at first. You might select “lex” and as you add matches you realize you have a “flex” in the middle you didn’t mean to match. Instead of starting over you can just skip it and continue. Similar to how the unselect command helps with the “whoops I selected one too many” situation, both play into the interactive feedback loop of multi-select IMO.

The multi-select as it is is still very helpful. I think the skip is the only missing piece for me right now.

Right now we’re considering different options for shortcut mapping and it will take us some time, I hope the shortcuts will be available in one of the upcoming updates for 13.1. So far you can map it manually via Settings -> Keymap.

A very useful fancy editing feature! But there is one more basically useful editing feature that IntelliJ IDEA editor does not have that I wish it would borrow from emacs: Narrow Mode. The ability to narrow the scope temporarily of all editing operations to just a part of the file.

Pure statistically speaking, what percentage of Idea user do actually use this feature?

I know there is a lot of talk and how great it is but I just don’t see the light yet: Personally I just search/replace a lot which gives me ‘multiple edits’ but apart from that I am good. Note, I do a lot of java, a bit of css + a bit of html, I don’t see a lot of repetitions in code that needs the same sort of edit.

I googled “IntelliJ outline doesn’t support paste” and your post arose. I know it is completely unrelated but I’d like to know if “the most intelligent IDE for Java” has a way to paste a method name for example in the outline of a class (cmd+o, in my Eclipse-like key mapping).